ABSTRACT
Human activity is often analysed as a set of behaviours which are in part universal, and in part culturally dependent. Eating, or grieving, are two examples (Super and Harkness 1982); language is another. With regard to language, structural linguists in particular have emphasised universal features, while others have been concerned with norms of development for a particular cultural group. There has in consequence been a preoccupation with how parents transmit patterns of behaviour to their children, and with how infants assimilate those norms. The weight of the evidence finds that infants indeed become like their parents in some sense: ‘Children move from a modest skill level in some domain to full adult competence (i.e. they converge)’ (Adams and Bullock 1986:157).
